


like glass

by lastwingedthing



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-21
Updated: 2011-08-21
Packaged: 2017-10-22 21:47:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/242912
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lastwingedthing/pseuds/lastwingedthing
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The future begins today.</p>
            </blockquote>





	like glass

**Author's Note:**

> Futurefic.
> 
> Okay, so in the interest of full disclosure - I stopped watching this show early in season two. And then after season three ended I got spoilered and discovered that the Merlin/Morgana relationship was suddenly totally fascinating to me again. They're like Clark and Lex, like Magneto and Charles Xavier, except with magic! I guess I can't get past tragic, doomed enemies who used to be friends.
> 
> I still haven't watched all of the show, but hopefully this fic still fits in with canon.

In a year they will meet again by the lakeside.

Grey waves lap against the stony grey shore. Merlin’s magic burns like molten gold in his hand, a torch held up against the fading twilight.

Morgana’s face is so white. As if there is no more blood in her, none of her old raging fire left to meet this last betrayal. She bends under the weight of it. Cold, like water, like icy stone.

“You,” she says. Through a trembling mouth that can barely manage words. “You.”

 _You, I trusted once. You that lost me, will lose me, so much that I have loved._

 _You the traitor._

You _are like me?_

There is already so much that lies between them. A prince and his blacksmithing love. Faithful knights and enchantment and bitter, bitter wine. The life of a bloodstained king.

A sorceress sleeping still on the holy isle. She waits and dreams under the snow-white blossom, but true love’s kiss will not wake her from that slumber.

Love tastes of apples there. And loss.

“You,” Morgana says again. With an ocean rising behind her eyes. Now comes the fury, and the gathering storm.

An unwary man could drown here.

But Merlin lowers his head to meet her challenge. The flame in his hand begins to burn brighter as, so slowly, Morgana unsheathes her night-black sword. Her magic comes slow and secret from the deep places. Like icy water that seeps from caverns beneath the earth, in a tide no mortal hands can stem.

Perhaps they have always been waiting for this moment to come.

***

In a decade, they will meet again and again. On the bright fields of battle, on the thorny edges of wolf-haunted forests, in light cast from a mirror or in the shadows in the corner of your eye.

There are meetings and there are partings and retreats, their movements as exquisitely calculated as a dance. They know each other so well. They are so evenly matched. Never again will their powers reach these heights.

He is the King’s man, Merlin, faithful as a lover. The Dragonlord, serving Arthur with power like lightning and a sudden flame.

And she is his partner in this dance. The fey dark lady, the other queen, the prophetess riding with a naked sword in her hand. Last priestess of the Old Religion. Morgana of the Fay.

They are living flesh and blood and yet they are legends both. Folk speak of them as they speak of their oldest myths, or as they speak of the long-lost years of magic few can now recall.

Their feats are legend. Their sorcery is legend. Who else is left, to wield the old powers as they do?

Who else is left like them?

They are like night and darkness. Like light and day. There is no space left for any others between them. They, and the boy Morgana guards still with her life, are the last.

And Mordred’s time too is running out.

***

In a hundred years, there will be time and to spare for grieving. Time and to spare to waste in what-ifs and regrets.

On that last battlefield where cold winds howl across the heaped mounds of the dead, Merlin and Morgana come together to mourn the end of all their works and all their hopes. There as the Pendragon’s kingdom fell the Druid boy met his end at last. There his bones will lie, with the brave knights and the bold knights and the armoured ruins of the last of all dragons. For a century the fields will bear the black scars of his scorching fire.

On that black day as crows spiral down in clouds from the sky, Merlin and Morgana meet to say farewell. And to kiss Arthur goodbye at the end of all things, before they carry him away to Avalon.

Before they carry him away to sleep on the timeless apple isle, where flowers do not wither and wounds do not heal.

On that black day, dazed and reeling, Morgana weeps as she says, I loved my brother. For the first time and the last she says the words out loud.

And Merlin too weeps. And Merlin too speaks of love and his king.

A brief moment of truce, they tell themselves, a space to breathe: all they have before their war begins again.

Each could blame the other, if only they could stop blaming themselves.

A hundred years they have to grieve. A hundred years, as a childless blacksmith grows old making shoes for horses and iron pots for farmer’s wives. She mourns her dead, and finds love again, and tempers her grief with stony wisdom; her crown she leaves to gather dust and cobwebs in the ruins of the white castle. She dies there as she was born, unremarked as any other village woman, the end she chose for herself at last.

And no-one will remember the names she bore. She left them behind, with her crown and her tragedy.

Men and women tend to their beasts still, build simple huts and sow seeds in ploughed fields in springtime. They do not speak of kings or noble deeds or magic.

They do not speak of Camelot.

The wounds are so raw. For a hundred years and more all things will grieve.

Some will never stop.

***

In a thousand years everything will change. Time flows like a river. But some streams never reach the sea.

In an ancient autumn city a boy walks between buildings of stone and metal and glass. Cars race by toward the river, under a lowering sky.

He thinks he is nineteen years old. He thinks he has a family, thinks he loves milky coffee and Johnny Cash and computer games, thinks he is going to start university this year.

He thinks he is real.

He reaches the riverbank as the wet leaves begin to swirl around him in the rising wind. He can smell water, that choking green river smell.

On the bank there is a girl watching the tide come up from the sea.

Her hair is long and black like a crow’s wing, her mouth like the strong curve of a crimson bow. Her eyes are a clear perfect blue. The songs poets wrote for her a thousand years ago have long been forgotten, but half the world still remembers her name.

But before she learns it herself she is a nineteen-year-old girl in scuffed boots and a leather jacket, with glasses and a ponytail and arms weighed down with shopping bags. A girl studying in design school, loving old movies, living in a flat with three friends. Anything but an ordinary girl.

Anything but real.

As the boy steps onto the path beside her their eyes meet.

Time stops.

The girl and the boy remember their names.

Memory roars as it races into them. It hurts. It hurts, as the thin paper shells they believed themselves to be burn away in the raging fire of all that they were, and are, and will be again.

All things burn when their time comes. After so long the wizard and the witch have no room left in them for any more grief, no power to mourn the loss of such thin brief lives.

Boys and girls have been dying like this for a thousand years.

No matter how many lives they live Merlin and Morgana will always find each other again. Some things, they tell themselves and each other in the blackest moments of the longest nights, cannot be forgotten.

***

But there is so much glory and so much shame and oh, sometimes they wish they _could_ forget. They will never stop trying, and they will never succeed.

It will not stop.

In another city they will never see, another girl is dancing with her love in the clear space between trestle tables. Paper streamers run across the bare boards of the church. The girl and her love are beautiful in their cheap dresses and their laughter.

This girl has never forgotten her name. A thousand years of this joy could not erase her old, old grief.

No grief could ever erase this joy. If love undid her once then love will be her salvation. The past is _done_.

Guinevere knows her name, and saves her mourning.

***

When the storm quiets Merlin and Morgana make their way to a small green space between the buildings. The trees are a comfort after so much metal, the sound of rain in the leaves as familiar as an old song from home.

His hand comes to rest in hers, clutching white-knuckled and tight.

They kiss in the rain and the sound of falling water. And when darkness falls they make fairy lights of gold and silver to hang above them as they lie together, as they let their naked bodies touch on a carpet of leaves.

And even now the past hangs like a curtain between them. They will never forget.

They will never forgive: they each have their pride. In an instant their war will begin again. In a single moment, in the beat of a heart –

But here, now, together, they will remind each other and wait. They could wait another thousand years.

They could wait for eternity: for worlds to change, for nations to crumble, for Camelot to rise again.

For as many years as it takes they will wait for Arthur to return.

***

 _In a day, they will ride out. The future hangs before them at the end of a short straight road, bright and hard and clear as glass._

 _Like glass it will shatter at a misplaced touch._

 _They will be children still, foolish mighty dreamers._

 _Tomorrow they will ride out and meet their fate._


End file.
